Theory of the deconfinement process in QCD

Abstract

The phenomenon of the deconfinement -- the spectacular drop of the colorelectric string tension at the critical temperature $T_c$ -- is studied within the method of field correlators (FCM) taking into account directly the contribution of the gluon condensate into the hadronic free energy. Using the resulting expressions for the free energy as a sum of the gluon condensate (the vacuum energy) and the hadronic pressure one obtains the possibility to calculate the deconfinement temperature $T_c$ and the temperature behavior of the string tension $\sigma_E(T)$ and the gluonic condensate $G_2(T)$ below $T_c$. The connection between the string tension and the quark condensate found in the framework of FCM allows the predict also the latter as a function of $T$ . These results are compared to the known lattice data of $T_c$, $\sigma_E(T)$, $\langle \bar{q}q \rangle(T)$ for hadronic media with different $n_f$ and $m_q$ and in the external magnetic field $eB$. The good agreement of the results of this approach with lattice data is demonstrated.